Previews

Grand Theft Auto IV

The host can pick any vehicle class, from muscle and sports cars to SUVs and boats. There's the choice of either a free race, in which you'll simply hit your lap points, or Cannonball Run, in which you'll have a set course that sends you around an area to get to the end of a lap. There seem to be myriad tracks to choose from, plus you can tweak them. The weapons choices are just as customizable as in other modes, so if you want to allow rocket launchers (and who wouldn't?), you can blow up fellow participants with RPGs. Same goes for car respawns, pedestrian presence, etc. If you've blown up your car and you're near the checkered flags, you can even finish a race on foot.

The beauty of GTA Race lies within its controlled chaos. After trying out a fairly linear race within Algonquin, we moved to another map called "Taxiing," set in Liberty City's equivalent of JFK Airport. "Blood on the Tarmac" would be a better way to describe it. Nearly every one of our races began with an attempt to race and within one minute, half of the participants in our eight-person match had resorted to trying to kill anyone passing them on the race course. Our Rockstar PR rep took to jacking every car in his vicinity to make a massive roadblock in one of the course's bottlenecks. Another person sat on the side trying to shoot out tires. In the meantime, planes were taking off and landing, which adds another dangerous factor into the map. After fifteen minutes of essentially playing "crabs in a bucket," we took it upon ourselves to get back on track and try to hit the finish line. We got third place, but not before we got sidetracked at least twice by a few grudges on the jetway.

That was all good preparation for our finale with GTA Race, a three-lap round on "Stars In Your Eyes," a deadly race around Star Junction, Liberty City's equivalent of Times Square. After lots of shouting and "F Us" on the wide-open airport section, the close quarters of Star Junction felt even deadlier. Since it's a smaller map, there's room for big stunts, plenty of shootouts -- you can pick up new weapons if you slow down and drive into them -- and, most importantly, plenty of Liberty City transit buses to make roadblocks. In both GTA Race and Team Deathmatch, you'll know when a round is coming to an end as the GTA4 theme starts to play. That's your indication that thirty seconds are left. As we heard the music hit on our final round of GTA Race, we started to feel a bit sad that we'd have to wait another few weeks to jump online and test the limits of our friendships. Of the three adversarial modes we played, it's GTA Race that feels most true to the spirit of the franchise.

After three hours of finding new ways to screw over other players, we took a step in a different direction with Hangman's NOOSE, a co-op mission. Co-op gives you brief, story-based missions to play with your buddies online. In this mission, crime boss Kenny Petrovic has just landed at the airport, but LCPD's SWAT teams are trying to make an interception. It's up to you and your friends to shoot your way through the cops, get Kenny across the tarmac to an escape chopper, then fly him to the extraction point. The catch is that unless a team member loses all of his or her lives, all of you must get there in one piece. Mission difficulty also will determine how big your payout is, and therefore how much it affects your rank.

We played through it twice on both easy and medium difficulty. Either way, it's quite harrowing; the first time, we got stuck in an armored SWAT car as we tried to stave off police officers from shooting down the escape chopper. The chopper made it to the extraction point, but one of our teammates had to fly back and rescue us. Unfortunately, the cops incapacitated the chopper, so we had to drive the van out of the airport. The line-of-sight police radar still applies to this mode, so we ducked, swerved, got caught, then drove off a freeway and destroyed the van before running on foot. Meanwhile, SWAT choppers were in hot pursuit, and cop cars followed us nearly the entire way to the extraction point. If this mode is a snippet of what we can expect in three weeks, we're looking forward to screaming orders at our friends through a headset ASAP.

Now that we've seen the scope of what Grand Theft Auto IV offers, from single-player to multiplayer, we're very excited for the final product. Prior to our demo, details had been vague regarding the game's multiplayer offerings, but now that we've tested out three of the adversarial modes and one of the co-op missions, we're confident that Rockstar's next installment can revolutionize the franchise in huge strides (multiplayer) as well as many of the subtle ones that we've noted in single-player. Get ready for the world's biggest sick day in three weeks, and don't be surprised if the content's slow that day from us, either. Odds are we'll be online with you.

See what our brothers and sisters at IGN Games have to say about the multiplayer in GTA IV and don't forget to check in with our special friends over at TeamXbox for more great impressions.